Review: Silence

The dance piece Silence creates music for movement – a review of the performance at the Helsinki City Theatre

Contemporary dance choreographer Jarkko Mandelin, who leads the Kinetic Orchestra, has been invited for the second time to create a new dance piece for the Helsinki City Theatre. The cooperation between Kinetic Orchestra, Helsinki Dance Company and Dance Theatre Minimi was made possible by the New Classics Fund.

Not a bad decision, a well-known person in the dance world, who himself led Helsinki Dance Company, might say. Contemporary dance choreographer Jarkko Mandelin, who leads his own Kinetic Orchestra and trains extensively internationally, has been invited for the second time to produce a new dance piece for the Helsinki City Theatre.

Gravity, which premiered in 2021, was a work made for eight dancers from Helsinki Dance Company and Kinetic Orchestra. In the middle of the coronavirus years, my criticism of it began like this: Gravity is like wind and sun and fresh rain for a soul exhausted by the lack of dance. This autumn, I haven’t experienced a lack of dance art, but Silence rushes into my soul with the same intensity and joy as Gravity.

Cooperation is strength in many ways. It will be interesting to see an even bigger work from Mandelin, as Helsinki Dance Company and Kinetic Orchestra have been joined by Dance Theatre Minimi. Twelve dancers fit nicely on the small stage of the Helsinki City Theatre, almost in the middle of the audience. In retrospect, I wondered how the work would work on a traditional box stage, with the audience positioned in only one direction.

Mandelin once again carries the group in a versatile and natural way, there is no direction of performance, but the choreography works from the viewer’s point of view from any direction. Mandelin has uncompromising confidence in the movement. Her acrobatic, wide-ranging movement language, which makes inventive use of the floor level and pair work, requires the dancers to cooperate and trust each other. The group assembled from different groups for this work works brilliantly together.

I have also been delighted by Mandelin’s ability to bring humour to his works. It is always perfectly hidden in the movement, never glued on or pointing. In Silence, this boyish unruliness sizzles here and there, ending with a surprising ending.

Silence is also addictive and tempting to see the work again, as some of the solos and duets included in the work and their performers change from work to work. The dancers themselves have choreographed these changing parts within the framework of the tasks and quality attributes related to the scenes. The lots are drawn the day before – at least not in front of an audience just before the performance, as in one of the works I saw by the pioneer of modern dance, Merce Cunningham!

In Silence Mandelin’s basic idea has been an orchestra that plays movement, with the aim of creating visual music. The realisation of the idea is once again seen as the importance of cooperation. The composition and sound design of the work is by Janne Hast, who has worked with Mandelin for a long time. Dance and music breathe together. When the music ends and the silence begins, the movement produces a sound, in the imagination. Insightful and successful!

Helsinki City Theatre’s autumn performances are almost sold out. In November, Silence will visit Dance Theatre Minimi’s hometown of Kuopio.

If at the beginning of the article I referred to Jorma Uotinen, who worked as a dance master at the Helsinki Dance Company in the 1980s, an anecdote from even further away from Finnish dance history fits at the end of this article. According to the story, in 1962, Mary Paischeff, the first swan queen of Finnish ballet, commented on the performance of Tamara Rasmussen, who later became a pioneer of Finnish jazz dance, as follows: “Men Herregud, hon var ju en klassisk dansös en gång!”

When looking at Jarkko Mandelin’s works, something similar may – humorously – occur in one’s own mind. After all, this artist, who smoothly combines contemporary dance, acrobatics and martial arts in her choreographies, has a solid background in classical ballet.

Review on the website of the Cultural Editorial Office